I know your post is a little bit tongue-in-cheek, phiilpma1957, and I'm sorry to hear you’re getting screwed over with KYC. This is one of the reasons that I've always considered my "cornz" to be an illiquid, unreliable asset. I know many have been able to cash out large amounts of Bitcoin but many have also been thwarted by the existing financial system or at the very least have been subjected to unreasonable and unwarranted delays and denials.

In the early days, it was relatively hard to acquire them; you had to be right on top of things to get a mining device in within a decent time frame with difficulty skyrocketing while wading through the various scams. I resorted to some PayPal deals, in-person cash deposits to bank accounts, and I even sent cash using registered mail.

When I finally discovered exchanges, I was so happy that it was finally going to be easy to get some Bitcoin and yet I still found myself having to make in-person cash deposits at a bank. Well, that didn't last long before the bank said "Nuh-uh" and the exchange had to find other funding methods - weird bill pay solutions that took a hefty percentage of a deposit. At the time, I hadn't even thought about cashing out my coins, so getting fiat money out wasn't something I had considered until the bank didn't want to deal with the exchange.

That was probably the first time I even wondered if I would be able to sell them for fiat in the future. I looked to a larger exchange - Mt. Gox - read up on them and understood it was previously a trading card website that was bought by Karpeles. "Wow," I thought, "this doesn't alleviate my fears one bit." When I realized I had to wire money to another country in order to buy Bitcoin, I wondered again about selling and getting fiat for Bitcoin. I wasn't going to wire money to Japan for anything ever, so that was out.

Sure, small amounts would be simple to buy and sell, but what if one day it was worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars? Am I going to be using Bitrefill, Coincards, Gyft, or hundreds of those stupid $1000 lifetime limit Visa or Mastercard debit cards to cash out? Then QuadrigaCX came along and alleviated my fears with quarter-page ads in the local newspaper. I might in fact be able to cash some in one day... and then, the CEO (Gerald Cotten) and the only person in the company apparently controlling the keys to the "cold" wallet "died" of "complications from Crohn's disease" while visiting India to check on an orphanage he was building for charity. “That's a bold strategy, Cotten. Let's see if it pays off.”

The investigators managed to find ~100 accessible Bitcoin from the exchange, with reportedly 100k+ locked away forever. That part I'm not even sure about because Mr. Cotten apparently had a bit of a gambling problem and was using customer funds with leverage on other exchanges trying to grow more corn all the while siphoning off funds so his girlfriend could buy properties. Then there was BTC-TC, Vicurex, Cryptsy, BTC-e, Havlock (which I lovingly referred to as Havenot), and of course, more recently FTX.

Anyway, I have so many other stories, but before I get carried away and totally blow my opsec, my rather long-winded point is that I would be much more inclined to believe that my ability to convert Bitcoin to fiat is compromised long before the U.S. government defaults on its debt. Compared to obtaining, hodling, or converting Bitcoin, how hard is it to create numbers out of thin air and package them with seductive interest rates (which is just money-in-waiting to be created out of thin air at a later date)? The U.S. Treasury has special powers they can exercise over and above the debt ceiling, and no Congress is going to shoot itself in both feet and the head by refusing to increase the debt ceiling to pay the U.S. debt... well, not any time soon imo.